In all these endless and idiotic discussions of “who has it better, men or women”, nobody ever defines what they mean by “it.” People who engage in such debates are not interested in promoting gender equality. They just want to throw a narcissistic tantrum.
A Small Observation
Clarissa's Blog 
It boils down to “I have it worse than you because I lost an arm while you only lost a leg !” kind of thing. Quite sad that people do not see others as their friends, colleagues
or loved ones but as “enemy, us versus them” kind of thing.
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I am not interested in overly emotional discussion, but I do think that fact-based discussion is necessary and worthwhile. For instance, gender analysis does show that all of our Presidents have been men, that the percentage of women (federal?) elected officials in the USA is 73rd highest in the world (need to fact-check this number, but the fact is that Europe and Scandinavia certainly outstrip the US in this statistic), that working men as an aggregate make more money than working women as an aggregate, and so on. Men are more likely than women to suffer serious violence from a non-intimate, women are more likely than men to suffer serious violence from intimates, family. Go forth and fact check if you like. These are descriptive statements about social organization.
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These statements, as true as they might be, don’t serve any practical purpose. So women suffer more from domestic violence and men suffer more from non-domestic violence. So? Now that we said it, what has changed?
Or take the fact that women collectively earn less. All true and really tragic, in my opinion. Yet every single housewife I know – every single one – has become one against the wishes of the man who feeds her. In several cases, the housewife engages in serious emotional abuse to ensure that the man keeps maintaining her.
All of these better \ worse, more \ less statements achieve nothing. They try to simplify very complex realities and end up obscuring their complexity from view.
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It’s, women earn less as individuals. In US currently the figure one hears is 77 cents on the dollar as compared to men. Google comparable worth.
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I’ve never known someone so drawn to identifying (what you perceive to be) narcissism. So interesting.
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The central problem in my life is a person (who will remain unnamed :-)) and who is a narcissist. This is my way of understanding my own life.
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I’d have to google what narcissism actually means. Precision isn’t my forte. 🙂 Excessive self-importance?
In any case, what I find interesting is the attempt to ascribe intentions or motivations to other people’s actions. How can you know anyone’s inner workings if you don’t ask them?
Not that I think you’re wrong about almost everything you’ve said, though I wouldn’t be so absolutist about everything. I just find it interesting (for reasons related to my own life 🙂 ) that anyone would think they could know *why* someone does what they do as far as their personal, psychological, inner-workings. External actions, sure. The effects of these, sure. The likely overarching sociological foundations or influences that led up to actions, sure. And intentional and unintentional messages to others, also, sure. But knowing why someone does what they do in terms of their own psychology? Only they can know that.
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“But knowing why someone does what they do in terms of their own psychology? Only they can know that.”
– It’s the exact opposite, actually. The hardest thing to know is one’s own psyche. This is the foundational idea behind psychoanalysis.
Here is my post on narcissism: https://clarissasblog.com/2012/04/25/narcissist-part-i/
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“In any case, what I find interesting is the attempt to ascribe intentions or motivations to other people’s actions. How can you know anyone’s inner workings if you don’t ask them?”
– The most useless thing in this context is asking people. Our psyche has a very well-developed capacity to mask our own motivations from us.
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Thank you for the responses.
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PS I asked you a question in my reply to another reader (below, probably?).
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Scroll down to the end of this page and you’ll find my response. This WP format is a little weird in terms of branching responses.
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Oh! Thanks.
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Well you can sorta know WHY they’re doing something if you see a contradiction between their proclaimed intentions and their actual strategies. Then you figure out they’re not doing what they claim to be doing, but have some other desired goal. That is a logical deduction.
The discrepancy between claim concerning intention and actual action could have quite a few explanations.
1. Misunderstanding one’s actual goals and what is required in order to attain them.
2. Misunderstanding as to what one’s goals *ought* to be. One has mistaken goals and is not meeting one’s proclaimed goals, because one is actually in touch with something closer to one’s heart.
3. Alternatively, someone is obviously not facing what they know to be true. But if they know it to be true, this already implies some authenticity on some level.
4. Someone doesn’t actually have goals. The true narcissist, lacking the will or capacity for introspection, makes it up as they go along — leading to many discrepancies between proclaimed intention and actual act.
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Would you (and bloggerclarissa) accept the assessments of others in describing psychological reasons for your actions over your own interpretations or understandings of your experience?
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People have certainly tried that on me, and they have been wrong. I’m not sure if you read anything I said, but I listed several possible attitudes or motivations behind behavior that may seem the same on the surface. Interpretations are never more than interpretations, even when I make them myself, however, because I have spent twenty years studying myself, I am more likely to be accurate in determining my attitudes or motivations than anybody else. I don’t go along with what seems to be a general psychoanalytic view that our unconscious minds are always at odds with what we think consciously. I think this applies in situations where people have become pathologically alienated from their emotions, due to some severe trauma or repressive habits instilled during upbringing, but unless you were brought up French during the 1950s, things are unlikely to be this dire.
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I read everything you wrote. I just had a question, so I asked it. 🙂 Thanks for the reply. (Smiley emoticon.)
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Used to be, at least in some areas of town, that people took some pride in how tough they had it. In three weeks time, I, a middle-aged lady of 44, will do a martial arts grading, which will try my strength and courage. I take pride in this sort of thing, but few men and hardly any women do.
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As I said over there I the problem is that even among the people that say it doesn’t matter who has it worse and want to just get to helping everyone there is a hidden condition. And that condition is that people on all sides are willing to stop arguing over who has it worse and get to work on helping everyone, on the condition that their own side gets the absolute, final, unchallenged word on who has it worse.
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If you are suggesting that I’m one of those people, then you are wrong.
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I guess when terms like Masculist and Feminist are used it pretty much points to “which” side youre on, regardless of how much you state the opposite.
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“I guess when terms like Masculist and Feminist are used it pretty much points to “which” side youre on, regardless of how much you state the opposite.”
– I’m sorry but this is another example of how the incorrect use of the pronoun “it” makes the entire sentence incomprehensible. And the confusing “” don’t help.
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Regardless of how could my grammar is you are bright enough to get my point. And we both know which side you are on. 😉
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“Regardless of how could my grammar is you are bright enough to get my point. And we both know which side you are on.”
– Once again, I have no idea what you are on about. What side? What does this statement even mean?
Expecting people to guess your vaguely defined ideas is quite disrespectful.
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lol, that should read “how good”
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No I wasn’t. But ill admit that i can be that way sometimes.
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Okay now that I’m at an actual keyboard (rather than on my cell phone) I can say a bit more.
Actually Clarissa you’re one of the better ones about not getting sucked into the spiral I was talking about. However I do think that this is a pretty common problem of, “It doesn’t matter who has it worse so just admit that I am right so that we can get to helping everyone, OK?”
Basically I’m saying that there are folks that seem to really do want to help everyone, as soon as people stop disagreeing with them about who has it worse.
So again, no I wasn’t trying to suggest that you are one that does this. But to clarify let me edit my first sentence in that comment.
As I said over there I the problem is that even among the people that say it doesn’t matter who has it worse and want to just get to helping everyone there are those that will only do so when a hidden condition is met.
I didn’t mean to say that everyone that agrees it doesn’t matter has this hidden condition but there are those that do.
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Mmmm. Sometimes defining relative position is useful, as a strictly limited exercise for allocating resources prior to practical action. Mostly, it’s a rhetorical blind alley,concealing the fact that the speaker has unconsciously fallen into the trap of considering equality to be a zero-sum game.
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“Would you (and bloggerclarissa) accept the assessments of others in describing psychological reasons for your actions over your own interpretations or understandings of your experience?”
– I’m not a narcissist :-), so yes, absolutely. How else will I solve any of my problems?
Have you read the story of my personal life here on the blog? If not, a short recap: a had an intensely miserable personal life where I kept meeting the same kind of man and repeating the same miserable story with them. I went to an online forum and shared that story with people because I wanted to complain about my bad luck and the poor-quality men I kept meeting. The people on the forum immediately explained to me that I was choosing such men on purpose because it served certain goals of my own.
After I realized that I was engineering this situation on purpose, I stopped doing it and my personal life became very happy.
For as long as I live, I will be grateful to these wonderful people who explained to me what I was doing to myself and why.
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In that lovely case, did you hear their assessment and compare it with your own experiences and feelings and then determine they were correct? Or, did they assess your situation and you immediately assumed they must be correct? (I suspect strongly I know the answer here, but, sincerely, I won’t be sure until I ask you about your inner experience of it.)
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My initial reaction was, “How dare these people not appreciate my exquisite suffering?!?” 🙂 So I decide to send them all to hell and not accept anything they were saying. And then I imagined a succession of many more miserable relationships and realized it would be easier to start listening to the forum people. 🙂
Ultimately, it’s everybody’s own choice whether they want to deal with their issues or not.
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Okay, so, they assesses your situation and were right. But, it was only you who knew if they were right or not.
For me, it all comes down to each individual being the only one who can know their own feelings, reasons, or motivations. If we’re smart and humble enough to learn from other people’s interpretations of us, our lives will be richer and more authentic.
What I find so interesting about the way you express yourself (very similar to the two or three other people with Asberger’s, though that may be coincidental) is you sound so sure you know someone else’s motivations when it’s so likely your assessment doesn’t match theirs.
Another question: how would you feel if someone said, “you do x because you are trying to achieve y” and, in your experience of yourself, they were totally incorrect?
Ugh. The WP phone app won’t let me fix errors up there. Would you mind making “assesses” into “assessed” on that first line? I won’t reread the rest so I can be sure I don’t see other unfixable mistakes.
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PS If I read your story it would’ve been a year or more ago so I’ve forgotten. I’ll happily check it out again. 🙂
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I had the opposite experience to Clarissa, and I am also not a narcissist. I tried to get explanations for a number of unfortunate circumstances in my life, and people said, “It’s down to you as an individual. There is something wrong with you. You’re not trying hard enough to succeed.” So, I tried even harder. I became hyper-conscious of every word I said and every action I did, and whether it was a prelude to failure or not. My self-consciousness and capacity to analyze myself became extreme. I gave supreme credence to the views of those around me, who perhaps saw something in me that I hadn’t seen. Nothing changed, except that actions that should have been natural and intuitive on my part became orchestrated and deliberate. This was exhausting. I became extremely fatigued, but still the implications were that I was unintelligent and not trying hard enough. I couldn’t figure it out at all.
As I pursued my PhD and gradually became more educated, bit by bit I realized that other people didn’t really know what they were talking about with regard to their “expertise” on my life. There was a turning point — around 2009 — when I realized the “impartial” observer was not necessarily more intelligent than I, either.
In the past few years I’ve been consolidating the knowledge that most of what people assumed to be true about me was based on their own cultural experiences along with their own self-serving psychological projections. This new understanding leads me to consider that I don’t need to get myself all worked up in order to succeed. I’m already highly motivated enough, without adding fuel to my fires. To the contrary, I need to learn to pull back and relax and accept things as they are. Above all, I need to stop taking direction or advice from narcissists.
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It strikes me as very human to take how others see us and either feel them as true (whether they are or not) or false (whether they are or not).
It also strikes me as very human to want to understand, on a variety of levels, why people do and say the things they do.
I still think that believing we can know someone else’s motivations better than they do only sets us up for problems. I’ve recently experienced this, and it was difficult to feel so not-known. I’ve also been humbled in the last 10-20 years realizing that, despite very sophisticated and effective social skills (including sensing meaning through body language, etc.), even I was sometimes wrong about people’s motivations. Frequently, people feel like I can read their minds, I “really understand” them and am quite on target when I guess their motivations. But I never assume I’m right anymore because if the times when I was significantly wrong. Reading someone who seems so committed to the belief that it’s so possible to know someone’s motivations better than they know themselves touches on my own experience and reminds me how little I really know about how people work. They are the ones who know themselves, not me or anyone else.
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That felt speech-y.
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Yes, I think it to be very humane not to presume to know everything about others. It is intelligent to realize one’s limits. An old truism is the more you get to know, the more you realize you don’t know. At the same time, it is important to realize that many people express themselves in a way that isn’t useful and should be disregarded. There are people who are psychologically messed up and they seem to proliferate because many people feel isolated and alienated, so they try to get control over others in order to feel better about themselves. Best be on your guard for those who are like this.
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musteryou, do you have Asberger’s?
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Not at all.
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🙂 okie doke. Do consider yourself a linear or logical thinker?
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“Do consider yourself a linear or logical thinker?”
– Have you met anybody who will admit their thinking is not guided by logic? 🙂
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Me. 🙂 Happily and frequently I mention my thinking is not guided by logic. At all, hardly. My logic might be there but I don’t know what it is. I only feel it.
*clarissablogger’s head explodes*
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There is no need to be rude.
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I’m sorry if you found something I said rude. I only meant to be funny, noting you might absolutely *hate* someone like me who doesn’t overtly depend on logic or facts.
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Ah ha! I’m an INFJ. I’ll likely bug the crap out of you and I’ll certainly find you fascinating. 🙂
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Whilst I’m definitely not Aspie, I expect I do have qualities in common with someone so defined, especially when I am tired and my allergies to pollen overcome me. I’d have to be super tired, but in those instances, I cannot think clearly at all and my capacity to remember names or take notes of social behavior diminishes rapidly. Then, I can and do also become a bit clumsy. However, if I keep myself energized and don’t overdo it, this never happens to me. It has also never happened to me outdoors.
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I just adore people like you (you know, in general, since I don’t know you personally) who have the capacity to think the way you do.
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What way is that?
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Using logical reasoning to explain things. Attention to detail. “Formal” or tidy. Stuff like that. The “T” part of your Myers-Briggs. I’ve got about zero of that.
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Sorry, but no, I am neither formal nor tidy. I do try to tidy things up as I go along, though.
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The way you write is all I know. That’s what I was talking about.
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Oh. I’m gradually trying to tidy up my writing. I tend to attack my topics like a whirlwind and then need to tidy up.
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I find your voice very structured (tidy) and thoughtful.
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Well I spent ten years thinking about the same topics, do my thoughts were bound to get a bit tidier eventually.
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🙂 Yeah. Sounds familiar (except my tidy is always loosey-goosey).
(And, another smiley emoticon 🙂 because I’m concerned I’m being read as negative in some way.)
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Thew greatest difficulty I’ve had in developing my writing is the poor reader, who doesn’t take time to query the parts of my writing that may be less clear to them, but instead jumps to conclusions about my identity, since what is not immediately apparent to them must necessarily be something dangerous or threatening, or, if one happens to be of patriarchal persuasion, “silly”.
I’m glad to be getting good responses these days to many of my revised blog posts, along with some newer material.
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“musteryou, do you have Asberger’s?”
– She does martial arts and rides a horse. She is the opposite of an Aspie. 🙂
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How is martial arts and riding connected to Asberger’s?
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“How is martial arts and riding connected to Asberger’s?”
– People think that Asperger’s is all about social skills and stuff like that. What they don’t understand that social skills can be mastered if one is so inclined. It’s the neurological aspects of Asperger’s that are a bitch. Low muscle tone, poor balance, an incapacity to judge distances, difficulties with distinguishing left and right. The idea of an Aspie working as a martial arts instructor is quite funny. 🙂 🙂 🙂
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“At the same time, it is important to realize that many people express themselves in a way that isn’t useful and should be disregarded. There are people who are psychologically messed up and they seem to proliferate because many people feel isolated and alienated, so they try to get control over others in order to feel better about themselves.”
– Exactly.
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I really loved the “even I am sometimes wrong” part. It reminded me of me. 🙂 🙂
“They are the ones who know themselves, not me or anyone else.”
– If only that were true. Then I wouldn’t need to pay all this money to an analyst to figure myself out.
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It’s funny how when it comes to trying to figure ourselves out, we often, perhaps generally don’t find the answers in any place resembling common sense, especially not the common sense of the masses. They’re the ones most likely to reinforce a false perception of reality, that keeps you operating in the same ways. I couldn’t work out what was daunting me in many situations until I realized I was projecting the better part of myself into others. So, when they came up with random pronouncements or critiques, these seemed to be imbued with the authority of someone who really took intellectual ideas seriously, who was very concerned with accuracy and rigor and who had deeply humanitarian impulses…. And yet, if these were the attitudes behind some of the comments, why would those comments have been made at all?
This incongruity between expectation and actuality used to confuse me a great deal, and then, one day, VOILA! I realized that people were speaking much more impulsively than I would do, and from a cultural rather than intellectual base. In other words, other people were rarely “like me” at all. I’d been projecting my own qualities into them, and then critiquing myself on the basis of what they had to say.
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A lot of times, when people claim to know your deep motivations, they are just applying to you some superficial stereotype. And, it took me a *very* long time to realize that many people, when they make pronouncements, are just talking randomly, as opposed to saying something they have thought through or really mean, or would even stand by.
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The scary ones are those who make a misogynist statement and do stand by it, though.
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